Our security and intelligence institutions need serious reform. South Africa has a long unfortunate history of politically compromised security institutions.

In 5 February 1998 then South African National Defence Force chief General Georg Meiring handed President Mandela a Military Intelligence Report which alleged that there was a left-wing plot to topple the government.…Read more

Two political ideologies describe my political orientation: social democracy and African nationalism. In an earlier blog, ‘Why Nations Fail?‘, I set out the meaning of my brand of social democracy with particular reference to views on the economy drawn from the book from which I drew the title.…Read more

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…Read more

A couple of years ago I read a book called Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James A. Robinson, in which the authors set themselves the ambitious task of answering the question why some states seem to remain locked in poverty and under development while other nations prosper.…Read more

Our team recently got together to watch a documentary called 7 Up in South Africa, the first in a series of documentaries which follow the personal lives of South African children from various walks of life born in the apartheid era.…Read more

I was born in Mthatha, raised in East London and Johannesburg, and have attended university in Cape Town for the past 5 years. I am Xhosa, black, Anglican, South African, African and human. I have had some education at places called Beachonhurst Primary School,…Read more